The economics of surveillance capitalism and a world of paranoid apps will transform the domain name system (DNS), says Geoff Huston, chief scientist at APNIC Labs, part of the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre.

Knowing the domain names of the websites you visit, or servers that apps access on your behalf, is valuable intelligence. DNS traffic is especially valuable because it reflects what users are doing in real time.

“The names you asked for, and when you ask for them, say an awful lot about you,” Huston said in his presentation to the APNIC 52 conference on Wednesday.

“The network betrays you. You’re leaving big, filthy, muddy footprints on the carpet, mate. We can see where you’re going. And that’s the problem,” he said.

“Real-time data, right here, right now. Not last week, not last month. This second. You couldn’t get more valuable.”

Others with more noble motives are monitoring DNS traffic too, looking for the telltale signs of malicious activity, such as the rapidly-changing domain names used by botnets.

And as Edward Snowden revealed in 2013, the members of the Five Eyes signals intelligence agencies are also keen on sucking up all that DNS traffic.

“All kinds of folk actually spread DNS information all over the place,” Huston said.

“The problem is, it doesn’t matter what your motives are, good or bad. Sniffing is sniffing. An invasion of privacy is invasion of privacy, irrespective of the colour of the hat you’re wearing. And this is not good.”

Grafting privacy onto decades-old protocols

The core DNS protocols date back to the 1980s, and they’re based on a domain name structure that was developed in the 1970s. Everything happens out in the open, unencrypted.

“How can we stop folk crowding around the digital exhaust pipe sniffing these fumes?” asks Huston.

There are methods for preventing third parties from snooping on your DNS traffic, but they haven’t seen wide adoption.

One way to make DNS surveillance more difficult is to use a public open DNS server, such as Google’s 8.8.8.8, Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1, OpenDNS, or Quad9 rather than your local ISP’s servers — because ISPs have been known to sell their DNS logs to advertisers.

That can be combined with using an encrypted DNS connection, such as DNS over TLS, DNS over HTTPS (DoH), or DNS over the more lightweight QUIC protocol.

If you do that, you’re doing a “tolerably good job” of hiding in the crowd, Huston said.

“But that first part of the bargain? I’ve got to trust Google. Yeah right. I’ve got to trust the very folk who are experts in assembling my profile.”

To put it another way: If we have to compromise our privacy to a third party, which third party represents the least risk to us, both now and in the future? It’s a difficult choice.

But wait. Maybe we don’t have to compromise our privacy at all.

Enter Oblivious DNS, a cryptographically private DNS name space

One innovative solution is Oblivious DNS, first written up as a draft engineering standard in 2018 and a formal paper [PDF] in 2019.

“The concept is delightfully simple,” Huston wrote in 2020, although some might argue with his use of the word “simple” once they read his explanation.

ODNS uses a chain of DNS servers interacting via a pipeline of encrypted transactions. The details will be fascinating for DNS aficionados, but the overall strategy is easy to explain.

The DNS server close to you knows who you are, so it can return the answer to you, but not what your query was because it’s encrypted.

The DNS server at the other end knows what DNS query it has to resolve, because you used that server’s public key to encrypt the transaction, but not who asked for it.

A similar approach called Oblivious DoH (ODoH), described in a draft standard in 2020, wraps the entire DNS transaction in an encrypted envelope.

The advantage of ODoH is that it doesn’t try to cram everything into the existing DNS packet format, meaning it can be slightly more elegant. The disadvantage is that it requires separate infrastructure from the existing DNS.

But why would anyone pay for all this?

Huston’s future of bloated, paranoid apps

“In terms of economics, the DNS is a wasteland,” Huston told APNIC 52.

“I don’t pay for queries, you don’t pay for queries. Who funds all this? Well, my ISP funds a lot of it. And it sort of comes out of what I pay them,” he said.

That means there’s no incentive for ISPs to improve DNS privacy.

“For ISP fees, the DNS becomes a part of Mr Cost, it’s not Mr Income, and so there’s a lot of resistance to making Mr Cost grow bigger because that’s the way you basically kill your business.”

The public servers are there, but who funds them? And how many users will change their DNS settings on their devices anyway?

“In some ways, improving the DNS is a labour of love. It’s not a labour for wealth and profit,” Huston said.

“Most folk just simply use their ISP’s resolver, because that’s the one you’re paying for, and that’s the one person who actually has an obligation to do this for you… So by and large, open DNS resolvers aren’t really going to take the DNS and run away over the hills.”

Huston thinks there’s one place where the privacy-protecting DNS protocols might take hold, though it won’t be for your benefit: inside the apps on your devices.

Facebook’s mobile app, for example, weighs in at more than 200 megabytes because it contains an entire operating system, including an entire network stack.

“Facebook is paranoid about a number of things. It’s paranoid about the platform snooping on it. It’s paranoid about other applications on the same platform snooping on the Facebook app,” Huston said.

“Facebook is incredibly valuable. It’s spent a lot of time and money understanding me, and assembling a profile of me that it can sell to advertisers. The last thing it wants to do is to give any of that information away to anyone else. It’s their data,” he said.

“Applications that divorce themselves from the DNS infrastructure as we know it is an inevitable and near-term future.”

Huston sees this progression as part of broader, historical waves of change that have “played out right now in front of our very eyes”.

The internet has gradually been transforming from network-centric services, to platform-centric services, to application-centric services.

“The DNS is being swept up with this, and almost every single part of the DNS changes as soon as the DNS becomes sucked into application space,” he said.

“Single coherent namespace? Nah, historical rubbish. Because the entire namespace then becomes application-centric, and different applications will have a different namespace to suit their needs.”

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Since February 2020, YouTube has removed more than 1 million videos related to dangerous coronavirus information, such as false cures and claims of coronavirus being a hoax, the company’s chief product officer Neal Mohan said.

The statistic was shared in a blog post outlining how YouTube views removing misinformation on its platform.

Other statistics included in the blog were that the video platform removes nearly 10 million videos a quarter, with the majority of these videos receiving less than 10 views before they are removed, and content in violation of YouTube’s policies represented 0.16% to 0.18% of total views.

While sharing YouTube’s ability to remove content, Mohan noted that speedy removals are “not nearly enough” and wrote that YouTube was working on “ratcheting up information from trusted sources and reducing the spread of videos with harmful misinformation”.

He also took the opportunity to flag that an overly aggressive approach towards removals would have a “chilling effect on free speech”, specifically pointing to governments ordering for content to be taken down.

“We’re seeing disturbing new momentum around governments ordering the takedown of content for political purposes,” Mohan wrote.

Two months ago, MIT Technology Review detailed that a human rights group had its videos documenting testimonies about missing Uyghur people in China blocked on YouTube as they contained ID cards.

The human rights group, Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights, had its YouTube channel blocked entirely on June 15, with the platform reportedly explaining that 12 of its videos received multiple “strikes” for containing people holding up ID cards to prove they were related to Uyghurs that have disappeared in China’s Xinjiang region.

YouTube reportedly said this type of content violated the platform’s policy as it does not allow content to contain personally identifiable information.

Meanwhile, a New Zealand inquiry into the 2019 lone-wolf terrorist attack on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, the government found that YouTube was “a far more significant source of information and inspiration” than extreme right-wing websites.

“The individual claimed that he was not a frequent commenter on extreme right-wing sites,” the inquiry’s report said.

“Although he did frequent extreme right-wing discussion boards such as those on 4chan and 8chan, the evidence we have seen is indicative of more substantial use of YouTube and is therefore consistent with what he told us.”

Activists face potential $5.1m fine for voter suppression robocalls

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering slapping a record-breaking $5.1 million fine against conservative activists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman after an investigation by the agency found the two men potentially violated US robocalling laws.

The proposed $5.1 million fine, if approved, would represent the biggest fine ever brought under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), the FCC said.

The two individuals allegedly made 1,141 unlawful robocalls to wireless phones in violation of the TCPA. Under those laws, robocalls are prohibited from being sent to consumers if they have not given consent for receiving the calls.

The proposal comes after Michigan attorney-general Dana Nessel filed a lawsuit against Wohl and Burkman accusing them of making over 85,000 robocalls aimed at discouraging voting in the 2020 election.

The robocalls allegedly falsely told people that mail-in voting would allow personal information to be collected by police and credit card companies, as well as give the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention powers to track people for mandatory vaccines, Nessel said.

In May, New York attorney-general Letitia James filed a separate lawsuit against Wohl and Burkman over similar allegations of voter suppression.

During the FCC’s investigation of the alleged robocalls, it received confirmation from consumers who received the robocall that they had not given consent.

The investigation also uncovered, through subpoenas, email exchanges between dialling service vendors and Wohl and Burkman about the robocall campaigns, including which zip codes to target.

The FCC added that 1,141 robocalls, made on August 26 and September 14 last year, identified Wohl and Burkman by name and used Burkman’s phone number for the caller ID.

In March, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) shut down a charity fundraising robocall scam that duped victims out of $110 million.

According to the FTC, the communication “bombardment” was mainly comprised of illegal robocalls, but after residents were told they would be funding charity projects related to firefighters, veterans, and children, millions of dollars were still raised by the group using “deceptive solicitations.”

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In 1994, I’d already been covering the internet for years and I knew it was going to change the world. Microsoft still hadn’t come around to that idea. In the first edition of Bill Gates’s book The Road Ahead, he barely mentions the internet. In the next edition, Gates gave the internet a chapter to itself and by May 1995 he realized that the internet would be a technology tidal wave. Microsoft started rewriting history to make itself an internet pioneer. Recently, Hadi Partovi, CEO of Code.org, revived that tired narrative in a series of tweets in which he claimed Internet Explorer “was the first real salvo in the ‘Browser Wars.’”

I covered the web in those days and I beg to disagree.

While Microsoft’s top brass put the internet on the back burner, others realized that Microsoft needed something to offer the numerous users who wanted a web browser. Their quick-fix solution was to adopt a commercial version, Spyglass, of the first widely successful web browser, Mosaic. This was the foundation of Internet Explorer (IE) 1, which rolled out the doors on August 16, 1995, as part of Microsoft Plus for Windows 95, a Windows software add-on package.

IE 1 did not do well. It also left a bad taste in Spyglass’s mouth. Spyglass was to receive a percentage of Microsoft’s profits from IE. What actually happened was Microsoft began bundling IE with Windows starting with the next version of Windows 95 for OEMs. Microsoft would eventually settle with Spyglass for $8 million in 1987

This Spyglass/Mosaic codebase would remain part of IE until IE 7 was released. The About window on IE 1 to IE 6 all contained the text “Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc.”

In the meantime, Marc Andreessen, one of Mosaic’s creators, took the Mosaic code and turned it into the first widely successful web browser, Netscape. Andreessen boasted that Netscape would “reduce Windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers.”

Microsoft returned the “love.” Netscape CEO James Barksdale testified that in a meeting with Microsoft: “I had never been in a meeting in my 33-year business career in which a competitor had so blatantly implied that we should either stop competing with it or the competitor would kill us.”

Partovi says Microsoft did this with technology, not illegal deals. Still, he admits that “we signed partnerships with anybody who would help us, even competitors like Apple and AOL.” At the time, though, Apple was in financial hot water and was even allowing other companies to build Mac clones, e.g. DayStar Digital.  America Online (AOL) was trying to jump from being a modem-based online service to a destination website and Internet Service Provider (ISP). Neither were Microsoft rivals. But, they could bring IE to more customers.

He claimed that the Internet Explorer team was the hardest-working team I’ve ever been on. And I’ve worked at multiple start-ups. It was a sprint, not a marathon. We ate every meal at the office. We often held foosball tournaments at 2 am, just to get the team energy back up to continue working!”

Partovi added, “Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work like their lives depend on it.”

He says this as if it were a good thing. It wasn’t. The rise of IE and the fall of Netscape had little to do with all programming death marches and everything to do with Microsoft’s monopoly over the desktop.

Since then, Partovi has backed off this last claim. He’s since admitted he “created the misimpression of a toxic culture and then glorified it.” He also confessed that when he founded Code.org, it “started out in an unsustainable ‘crunch mode,’ and as we’ve grown, we’ve intentionally focused on how to achieve our ambitious long-term goals in a way that also offers a healthy work/life balance for our team.”

Why? Partovi continues: “Tech history explains this to be about Microsoft’s Windows monopoly, which surely played a role. But it wouldn’t have been possible if Microsoft didn’t also learn how to work on ‘Internet time.'”

Sorry, I reviewed all those versions of IE and their competition back in the day. I’m sure the IE team worked really hard on its program, but Netscape Communicator was where the real innovation happened. For example, love it or hate it, JavaScript is arguably the most popular language in the world, and JavaScript was a Netscape creation.

Here’s the real reason why IE beat Netscape: Microsoft strong-armed PC vendors into putting the new operating system and its browser on all their PCs. The goal was not so much to kill off other PC operating system vendors. There wasn’t any real competition in the mid-90s. The goal was to destroy Netscape.

The courts, in case you’ve forgotten, agreed. The Department of Justice won in its lawsuit against Microsoft on the grounds that its PC monopoly may make it impossible for Netscape to compete with IE. Unfortunately, rather than breaking Microsoft up into separate companies or open-sourcing Microsoft’s code, the government gave Microsoft a slap on the wrist.

As former judge Robert Bork, speaking on behalf of trade group ProComp, said at the time, the settlement was “indeed deeply harmful to the public interest” and “is completely deficient.” He described it as “a surrender” on the part of the Justice Department.

And, worse still, the deal failed to address one of the most important aspects of the court ruling that found Microsoft had violated U.S. antitrust law: The commingling code. In its decision, the court found that Microsoft’s merging together of the IE and Windows software code constituted an anticompetitive act. “Yet this decree does not deal with it at all…so Microsoft remains free to bolt products together,” Bork stated.

So, of course, Microsoft continued to do this. Netscape staggered on to eventually die. Years later, its browser code would live on in the Firefox web browser.

For more than a decade, Microsoft would continue to dominate both the desktop and the browser. It was only after Google, a technology business powerhouse in its own right, released the Chrome web browser in 2008 that IE would face a market challenge it couldn’t overcome.

Technically, from beginning to end, IE was never the best browser. It won because an illegal monopoly was allowed to continue.

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Mozilla released Firefox 91 on Tuesday, with a pair of new privacy features and one offering increased Windows integration.

When users use a private window in Firefox, the connection to the requested domain will now default to HTTPS even if a user manually enters the HTTP protocol. An HTTPS-first request will also be made if a user clicks on an HTTP link.

The browser maker warned that HTTPS by default only allows to the page itself, and not necessarily all images, CSS, or JavaScript files loaded by the page.

“However, loading a page over HTTPS will, in the majority of cases, also cause those in-page components to load over HTTPS,” Mozilla said.

“We expect that HTTPS by Default will expand beyond Private Windows in the coming months.”

In November with Firefox 83, Mozilla enabled users to switch on HTTPS-Only mode, which has the same functionality as HTTPS by default.

The second privacy feature is dubbed enhanced cookie clearing. When a user asks Firefox to delete cookie data from a site, not only will Firefox remove cookies from that site, it will blast away any tracking cookies placed on the site as well.

The functionality is built on total cookie protection that appeared in Firefox in February, and separates cookies on a per-website basis — meaning supercookies such as those placed by Facebook were restricted to one container.

“When you decide to tell Firefox to forget about a website, Firefox will automatically throw away all cookies, supercookies and other data stored in that website’s ‘cookie jar’. This Enhanced Cookie Clearing makes it easy to delete all traces of a website in your browser without the possibility of sneaky third-party cookies sticking around,” Mozilla explained.

“Before Enhanced Cookie Clearing, Firefox cleared data only for the domain that was specified by the user. That meant that if you were to clear storage for comfypants.com, Firefox deleted the storage of comfypants.com and left the storage of any sites embedded on it (facebook.com) behind. Keeping the embedded storage of facebook.com meant that it could identify and track you again the next time you visited comfypants.com.”

Now when users head to settings to manage cookie data, users will see a listing of jars rather than domains. Users can also right-click on “Forget About This Site” in the history menu to remove cookies and cache related to the site, as well remove from the browser history and delete any data Firefox has stored about the site, such as permissions.

In order to use enhanced cookie clearing, users needs to have strict tracking protection enabled.

Firefox 91 also arrived with single sign-on integration with Windows for Microsoft, work, and school accounts. This feature can be enabled from the privacy and security section of Firefox settings.

The browser also gained support for Scots locale in its latest release.

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In 1989, the internet was still largely used by researchers, academicians, and the military. By 1993, it was well on its way to being the internet you know. Two developments made this happen: The web and the far more obscure Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX). Here’s how it happened.

In the late 80s and early 90s, the internet had evolved from the military ARPANet into a public network for the military, scientists, researchers, and academics. It was available if you were at the right school or worked at the right job, but most people had no access to it.

Even when you could use the early internet, you had to use ASCII-based applications like pine and elm for email and Unix command line/shell programs like ftp and Archie for finding and sharing files. The most advanced tool we had was Gopher, a Yahoo-like guide to internet resources. After Berners-Lee invented the web, everything changed.

No one saw the revolution at first. The web, which was running on NeXTStations — Steve Job designed Unix workstations that would prove to be the forefathers of today’s Macs — was only available to a few people in techie internet circles. It was, after all, created to help scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, share search, not share cat pictures. That came later.

It wasn’t until early 1993 that the public learned about the web from some guy named Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. Looking back, I didn’t quite get it either.

While I was the first writer to describe the web to a mass audience, I focused on WAIS. WAIS was one of the first of what we now call public search engines. While there had been many other search engines before it — starting with NASA RECON, Dialog, and OCLC — these weren’t publicly available and confined themselves to a relatively narrow data set. WAIS was the first to make most public internet resources searchable.

WAIS was really Google’s ancestor. But, without the web, search engines would still be limited to restricted areas of knowledge.

At the same time, people were becoming more and more interested in using the internet for more than just research. Usenet, a primitive social network of many discussion groups, whetted people’s appetite for socializing and doing business on the net. Unfortunately, you couldn’t even sell your used car on the net, never mind run a company like Amazon.

Yes, believe it or not, before today’s hyper-commercialized internet appeared where you can barely find a single webpage without advertisements or cookies, in the early 90s you couldn’t do anything related to business on the net. That would change with CIX.

Early Internet Service Providers (ISPs), such as IBM, Merit Network, and MCI started to provide business services over national and regional networks. To save money and expand their reach, in 1990 they formed the nonprofit Advanced Network Services (ANS), which created the first commercial internet backbone, ANSNET. This same wide-area network was also used by NSFNET; part of the older non-commercial internet was running on the same cables and routers.

ANSNET did more than increase the early internet’s backbone speed from T1’s blazingly fast 1.544 megabits per second to T3’s then-amazing 44.736 Mbps. It was a long time ago.

In 1993, the NSF also agreed to let the trio of pioneering internet companies form ANS CO+RE Systems, a for-profit corporation that sold corporate internet access — as long as they didn’t use the net for advertising. Oh, how things have changed!

This agreement opened Pandora’s box. Now, everyone wanted to use the rapidly expanding network, as data jumped from business to nonprofit networks and back again. To hash out these issues, a public mailing list, com-priv, was set up on an early internet service provider, PSI Network (PSINet). From these conversations, three ISPs that were not part of ANSNET (CERFNET, PSINet, and UUNET), formed their own network of networks: the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX). From these conversations, three ISPs that were not part of ANSNET (CERFNET, PSINet, and UUNET), formed their own network of networks: CIX.

But, ANSNET and CIX couldn’t agree on sharing traffic. This annoyed everyone on the early internet who couldn’t even easily send emails to one another. In 1992, Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development and its killer-app Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, became chairman of CIX. He got the two sides to agree to a “great compromise.” In the agreement, ANS and CIX agreed to share traffic across each other’s networks. As Kapor said then, “In taking this significant step, we enable greater freedom from content restrictions on the Internet.” Does that remind you of net neutrality? It should. This is where it starts.

After they made peace, ISPs sprang up throughout the world, offering internet access at the unheard speed of 28.8 kilobits per second (Kbps). As I said, it was a long time ago.

Now all that was needed was an easy-to-use program that would let users search and play and work with what they found on the internet. People were already used to using online services such as AOL and CompuServe.

That’s where the web browser comes in.

The first popular graphical web browser came from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Mosaic, created by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, wasn’t the first graphical web browser. ViolaWWW, a Unix browser, takes that honor, while Cello was the first Windows graphical web browser.

Mosaic, however, was the first browser to enable you to see images within pages. Earlier browsers could only show images as separate files. It was no contest: Mosaic would dominate the first browser war.

Today, 30-years later, many of you can’t even imagine a world without the web. You think of it in terms of Facebook, Twitter, funny cat photos, memes, Netflix, and World of Warcraft. But without the web’s technology and CIX’s commercializing of the net, none of this would exist.

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You are in the middle of your favorite streaming program when you unexpectedly experience the much dreaded “spinning wheel.” You thought you’d chosen the fastest internet speeds. So why is this happening? There are actually two separate speeds you may not have considered: download speed and upload speed.

To help you understand the difference between the two speeds, we’ve created a primer on both types of speed, why they matter, and what you can do to optimize them for the best internet experience.

How to optimize for ideal download/upload speed

If you’re looking for ways to optimize your internet speeds, there are a few things that you can do to make sure you’re getting the best experience possible.

• Run an internet speed test: Before you can go about fixing your connection, you need to know what you’re working against. Run a free internet speed test to start to get a sense of where your download and upload speeds are. Then, once you’ve completed some of the suggestions below, run it again to track the change.
• Reset your router: Routers should be reset every so often to refresh your internet connection. To do this, it’s as simple as turning the router off, waiting 30 seconds, and turning it back on again. Know that it won’t drastically change your internet speed, but it will help a bit.
• Clear your cache: As you visit websites, your browser collects information about you and your browsing habits in the form of cookies. Marketers use this information to produce ads that are relevant to your interests. However, when your browser stores too many of these cookies, your internet can get sluggish. You’ll need to clear your cache in order to get rid of them.
• Try a different internet service provider (ISP): If slow internet has really got you down, one thing that you can do is try to negotiate with your current ISP to see if they can move you to an upgraded plan or to switch service providers entirely. You may even be able to save a little money if you move to a new company.

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Google Identity Services aims to make it easier for businesses to gain new users and make life easier for users to sign in. It’s available as a software development kit containing its Identity APIs, including the Sign with Google button as well as the new One Tap prompt.

“Sign in with Google and One Tap use secure tokens, rather than passwords, to sign users into partner websites and apps,” says Filip Verley, a product manager on the Google Identity team. 

The easier sign-up and sign-in processes are meant to help end-users avoid the pressure of picking convenience over security when deciding on yet another password for an app or website.

The One Tap prompt brings the login to the user on the page they’re at on a given website. So, instead of being interrupted when redirected to a landing page, the One Tap prompt slides down from the top right of a website and from the bottom up on a mobile device.

“Users can sign in to or sign up using just one tap, without having to remember their credentials or to create a password,” explains Verley.

Google has also improved the Sign with Google Button – the buttons users see that show which Google Account they’re signing in to a website with – so that it displays more personalized user details when returning to a site.

Reddit has implemented the new Sign in with Google button and the One Tap prompt. Pinterest has also implemented the Google Identity Services APIs. According to Google, Reddit has increased new user sign up and returning user conversion by almost twice.

Key to One Tap sign-ups are ID tokens that are generated for users with Google Accounts on a device. The ID token is shared with the website operator.

“When you display the One Tap UI, users are prompted to create a new account with your app using one of the Google Accounts on their device,” Google explains in its developer pages.

“If the user chooses to continue, you get an ID token with basic profile information—their name, profile photo, and their verified email address—which you can use to create the new account.”

Currently, Google One Tap works with Chrome on Android, macOS, Linux and Windows 10. No mobile browser is supported on iOS. Edge on macOS and Windows 10 is supported, while Firefox is supported on Android, macOS, Linux and Windows.

Google notes that One Tap is not supported on Safari for iOS and macOS because of Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention.

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This article will be one of those “Do as I say, not as I do” kinds of things. I do not necessarily fit the profile of a traditional consumer, and I take a lot more risks with our technology than other people do. Indeed, I do not recommend that anyone use beta software to run line-of-business functions or that you install beta code on personal devices unless you are prepared to deal with the consequences and side effects of when this software goes haywire.

It’s not a question of “if” it will fault; it is when and how badly.

How I beta

For certain things, I dedicate hardware to beta testing, such as PCs for Windows 11. But for other things, I do not have the luxury of buying dedicated equipment for testing. As I am the kind of person that loves to play with technology, and others rely on me for guidance and recommendations, I always jump on new betas when they become available — which means I am pretty much always in beta.

So, for example, my iPad and my iPhone are both running iOS and iPadOS 15 betas. My Watch is WatchOS 8, and my Apple TV is tvOS 15. The only Mac I have right now that is current enough to run Mac OS 12 Monterey is also running the beta. And my Pixel is running Android 12. So pretty much, except for my wife’s things for her personal use, all the major devices in my house are running Beta code.

Installing Apple betas

To sign up during the early stages, you need an Apple Developer account which costs $99 a year. When Apple releases Public Betas, usually a few weeks after the Developer Betas, anyone can join, but you have to install a profile (a special file) on your device to download and install the beta code.

Public betas and the profile signups are accessed at http://beta.apple.com, which you need to visit using the device you want to set up. Betas that are available to load on your device are:

• iOS iPadOS 15 (But there’s 14.x too!)
• MacOS 12 Monterey
• WatchOS 8 (profile install done through iPhone and Watch app)
• TVOS 15 (this is done through System Menu and choosing “Install Beta Updates”)

Once profiles are installed, you use the Settings > General > Software Update function to install the current beta version on each of these devices/platforms. watchOS and tvOS are slightly different — the profile for watchOS is downloaded using the iPhone as you would the iOS beta and is pushed to the Apple Watch with the Watch app. tvOS is done through the System Menu and choosing “Install Beta Updates.” You can also set these to auto-update overnight when a new build comes out.

You’ll want to have the device plugged in, and at least 50 percent charged to install the betas.

Installing Android betas

• Pixel is the Android beta test hardware platform of choice if you want to do it as a developer. It has its own program for Android 12, and is easy to join. Pixel devices can be purchased at the Google store.
• Beta signups occur at the Android Developer website at developer.android.com or android.com/beta
• 3rd Party vendors/partners have their own Android 12 programs, and they aren’t as up to date, with the possible exception of OnePlus. Samsung is not on the list; it rolls out Android betas and releases at its own pace.

Installing Windows 11 Insider Beta

• To join the Windows Insider Program, you must first sign up at the Windows Insider website using an email address associated with a Microsoft account. (Businesses can join the Insider for Business program using Azure AD addresses, but most people will use a Microsoft account.)
• After signing up, sign in to the Windows 10 PC you want to use for testing, and then go to Settings > Update & Security > Windows Insider Program. Click Get Started and link the Microsoft account you signed up with earlier.
• Your Insider flight settings need to be set to “Beta” or “Dev” to get Windows 11 flights. We recommend most end-users join the “Beta” channel as it has a direct path to the release version of Windows 11 and has expected updates every six weeks. “Release Preview” is currently used for Windows 10 pre-release builds, but this will change in the future as Windows 11 is released, and flighting of pre-release builds begins as part of its regular software development lifecycle.
• You then need to run Windows Update to pull the Beta or Dev builds down from Microsoft.

While many PCs can participate in the Windows 11 Beta and Developer Preview program, it should be noted that the release version of Windows 11 will only be offered to qualified hardware that meets system requirements. Older PCs that don’t meet the Windows 11 hardware requirements (such as those with an Intel Gen 6 or Gen 7 CPU) are blocked from participating in Windows 11 previews.

If you were a member of the Windows Insider Program in the Dev channel when Windows 11 was announced, you might be able to run the Windows 11 Beta on unsupported hardware, but that “limited exception” ends when Windows 11 is released to the general public. At that time, you will not be able to upgrade to the official release and will have to reinstall Windows 10.

Installing Browser Betas

These exist on all the major platforms: Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and Linux. Browser builds can be installed independently so that you can run stable, beta, dev, and canary side by side without interfering with each other.

Google Chrome

• Beta Channel (lowest risk, best for average users to look at new features in the browser)
• Dev Channel (weekly builds for software developers)
• Canary Channel (nightly builds, not recommended for the faint of heart)

Microsoft Edge

Edge has a similar beta program to Chrome:

• Beta Channel (new build approximately every six weeks)

• Dev (Every week)
• Canary (Every night)

Firefox

Betas for Firefox are available at Mozilla.org:

• Beta
• Dev
• Nightly

The downside of having a beta lifestyle

In addition to the many bugs that you will encounter, the routine thing you will deal with is slower performance because in a beta, particularly in the earliest builds, all the debug code is turned on, and that eats up additional CPU and will chew up your battery. I’ve also seen devices get a lot warmer during betas because of the increased CPU cycles.

I deal with application and OS crashes all the time. Usually, it’s no big deal; it’s just an inconvenience. But you want to save often, just in case you freeze up when you are working on an important file.

But be prepared for a beta to interfere with your work or getting things done. For example, last weekend, I was driving in the car with my wife and wanted to navigate with Apple Maps on my iPhone, which runs the iOS 15 beta. Well, the software crashed constantly, and I had to use my wife’s iPhone, or we weren’t going to get anywhere that day.

Another example of betas getting in the way of getting your work done is the new Private Relay feature in iOS and iPadOS 15 and Mac OS 12 Monterey that is part of the new iCloud+ functionality. Because it is during a beta preview and a cloud service, Apple has not necessarily scaled out their cloud instances to handle tens of millions or hundreds of millions of proxy requests, so it can drastically interfere with your internet browsing performance and stop working completely. I’ve had to manually turn it off from time to time for my internet performance and behavior to return to normal operation.

When running a beta, the other thing you want to consider is having an alternative way to deal with critical apps and functions (such as home automation, banking, etc.) if they stop working on your beta testing device. Make sure you can sign into web UXes from a PC or a browser if something stops functioning or that you have an alternative device to run them from (such as your spouse’s).

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Fast facts:

• Our analysis of data from major ISPs found that the average customer who rents equipment for their internet service could save upwards of $150 per year by purchasing their own router.
• In contrast, a top-rated router can be as cheap as $70 as a one-time expense.
• Purchasing personal equipment will save consumers $750 over the lifetime of a router and thousands more over a lifetime of internet usage.

It’s something that most people don’t think about, but when they sign up for residential internet service, there are often several hidden costs that can drastically increase their monthly bill. One of the most expensive additions is paying to rent equipment directly from the ISP like a router and modem. While most people might not notice a $10-$15 addition on the cable bill each month, over the lifetime of a service plan, those costs can add up to hundreds or even thousands of dollars in unnecessary fees.

To get a specific number, we pulled data from all major ISPs to average out how much customers are paying to rent equipment directly from their cable company. For internet service, for example, the average customer is paying between $12-$15 per month to rent equipment like a router and modem.

Over the lifetime of a cable contract, this could end up being thousands of dollars. In other words, you could end up making costly payments for a piece of equipment that costs less than $100 that will last years.

By researching major e-commerce platforms, consumers can easily find a high-quality router for $50-$70, depending on their needs. This one-time expense will pay for itself in under six months, and will rarely need a replacement or upgrade. Even more expensive, top-of-the-line routers will pay for themselves within a year or two.

There might be an argument that many consumers feel intimidated by managing their own equipment, as things like set up and maintenance can feel technically demanding for the average person. While most ISPs won’t provide service on the equipment you’re not renting from them, it’s rare for a router to need much more maintenance than the occasional reset. Once the initial setup is complete, it would be unusual to need much more technical support.

We spoke with several cable customers about their experience setting up their own router, and they found it to be far less complicated than they had imagined.

“It took maybe 15 minutes and I’m not a technical person. I followed the instructions in the box and had my own router working with no issues at all,” one respondent said when asked about their experience.

It can be important to upgrade equipment every so often, but it’s not an annual requirement or even every two to three-year commitment. While the demand for faster downloads for things like movies and TV streaming services or online games has never been higher, most routers will be up to the task for years to come. And while technology and security changes may cause the need for an update after five years or so, major brands will continue to support their products.

If you are looking for a simple way to trim expenses from your monthly budget, consider purchasing your own router instead of renting it directly from your ISP.

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Smartphone users in Brazil spend more time on their devices than any other country in the world, a new report has found.

Daily time spent on mobile apps globally jumped 45% between 2019 and 2021, according to a report published by market data company App Annie Intelligence.

On a daily basis, Brazilians used their smartphones for 5.4 hours on average in the second quarter of 2021. By comparison, daily smartphone use in Brazil reached 3.8 hours on average in 2019, and 4.8 hours daily in 2020.

Up until last year, Brazil was the second country in the world with the most intensive use of smartphones, behind Indonesia, which now ranks second with an average of 5.3 hours of smartphone use per day.

India ranked third in the research with a daily smartphone usage time of 4.9 hours on average, followed by South Korea (4,8 hours), Mexico (4,7 hours), Turkey (4,5 hours), Japan (4,4 hours), Canada (4,1 hours), United States (3,9 hours) and United Kingdom (3,8 hours).

A separate report on global trends, also by App Annie, highlighted areas of growth within the mobile app landscape. When it comes to the depth of engagement among the top social networking apps, the study noted that WhatsApp is the app Brazilians use the most, with an average of 30.3 hours per month in 2020 compared to 26.2 hours in 2019.

Notably, the use of TikTok in Brazil increased significantly, 14 hours in 2020 compared with 6.8 hours in 2019, growing faster than Facebook (15.6 hours per month versus 14 hours per month in 2019), Instagram (14 hours in 2020 versus 11.5 hours in 2019) and Twitter (6.4 hours per month in 2020 versus 5.1 hours in 2019).

According to the App Annie trends report, Brazil saw 75% year-over-year growth in downloads of finance apps in 2020. The average number of hours spent in such apps also increased by 45% last year.

Separate research by by consultancy Ebit/Nielsen in partnership with Brazilian fintech Bexs found that more than half of all online purchases in Brazil were made through smartphones since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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